Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Extend before inventing
Sometimes a system or component already exists to build on. Sometimes the feature isn't needed at all, and an existing one just needs extending. Seeing that takes thinking outside the bounds of the thing being designed, across everything in the product, and speed makes it matter even more.
Primitives that build on each other
Systems thinking matters for another reason. OpenAI is building a superintelligence with many capabilities, so the team keeps asking what underlying primitives can build on each other. Notion did this early: it built blocks, and then everything was composable.
The goal is to avoid one-off, siloed experiences. When pieces build on each other, using the product feels like one cohesive, simple thing, and the model can reason about how to pull the pieces together.
Why do reusable blocks make software composable?
Composable software is built from small parts with predictable behavior that can be combined in many ways. Doug McIlroy stated an early version in 1978 as part of the Unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing and work together. The same logic applies to Notion's blocks, where a block of text, a table, and a to-do item follow shared rules. Parts that follow shared rules can be rearranged without new engineering.
How do design systems keep products consistent?
A design system is a shared library of reusable components, along with rules for how and when to use them. A button built once appears identically across every screen that needs it. Google introduced its Material Design system in 2014 to unify the look and behavior of its apps across devices. Teams that reuse components also avoid rebuilding and retesting the same piece.
Why do one-off features pile up costs?
Every separate feature needs its own code, testing, documentation, and support. Computer scientist Meir Lehman and colleagues, working from the 1970s, observed that software grows more complex as it evolves unless effort is spent to reduce that complexity. Features built on shared parts add less new surface to maintain than features built from scratch. Their findings are known as Lehman's laws of software evolution.
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